Title: The John Hart Chronicles: The Soul Trap, Part Four

Author: Emma

Characters: John Hart, OCs

Rating: Small bits of Not Safe For Work, but if you blink you miss it!

Disclaimer: Oh, please. If I owned them, would I let some of those idiots write the scripts? And if I were making any money off them, would I be where they could find me?

Summary: John finds dangerous alien technology in the strangest place…

Author's Note: At the end of Exit Wounds, John Hart told Jack Harkness he was going to see a bit of the Earth. These are his adventures. In the HomecomingVerse they are before AND after A Very Private War but before Homecoming

Part One is here; Part Two is here; Part Three is here

            Hart dismissed the fleeing man; it wouldn’t be difficult to trace him one way or another. He ran to Munro’s side.  The Scotsman was still alive, but he was unconscious. His breathing was shallow and there was blood seeping from his mouth. Surreptitiously, Hart reset his wrist strap to medical mode and ran it over Munro’s body. There was severe damage to the legs and some internal bleeding, but with proper medical care and a great deal of luck he had a good chance of survival.

            “Sir? Excuse me, sir. Do you know this gentleman?”

            Hart stood up. The young constable had been joined by an older, more experienced-looking one. “I wouldn’t say know, but I’ve met him. Last night. The night train from London. Had a drink at the lounge before bed. His name is Cameron Munro, and he’s a junior partner at Munro and McLeod.”

            “Nice solid concern, that,” the older constable said. “Right up the street here on North St. Andrews.”

            “He must have been going to the office, then. He mentioned he was running an errand for a client.”

            They heard the sound of an approaching ambulance and shared a relieved look. Hart pulled out one of his business cards – the one with a real name, address, and phone number – and offered it to the younger constable. “I’m afraid I have business of my own, but if there’s anything else I can be reached at the Old Waverley Hotel. Terrible business, this.”

            “And stupid, too,” said the older policeman. “We’ll have our hands on the driver within a few hours.”

            Hart, who would have bet half of his rather healthy bank account that the lorry would prove to have been stolen, nodded in agreement. “Well, then, I’ll be off.”

            Graciously waving away their thanks, he lost himself in the crowd of onlookers. Once he was certain the policemen’s attention was fixed on other things, he turned back, resetting the wrist strap and aiming it at the lorry. A glance at the readings told him he had enough to track down the driver, even in a busy city.

            The clerk at the Old Waverley greeted him as befitted an old and valued client and handed him they key to his suite.  Once inside, Hart poured himself a drink and called the Dorchester. Finalizing his business with the Correliian took a few minutes – the pearls to be sent off by courier at the client’s expense after payment was received. Being cheated was not a consideration. After a couple of deliberately severe examples of what happened to people who tried to cheat Hart had become common knowledge, very few people were willing to try. None more than once, anyway, which reinforced Hart’s reputation rather neatly.

            Business out of the way, Hart turned to consider the problem of Cameron Munro. If truth be told, and he tried never to lie to himself, he had been acting out of character since meeting the Scotsman. He had been looking for a good shag and the possibility of an alibi if it became necessary; instead he had spent the night getting to know the man and after the accident had run to his side instead of chasing the soul trap, which, from just the cursory look he had gotten the night before, would have been worth about ten times Lady Bentley’s pearls. Something about the man attracted him and made him feel both possessive and protective, and hadn’t happened since…. Jack.

            He was not going to think about the past.

            He was, however, going to take apart the bastards who had hurt Cameron.

            He set up his laptop, which resembled a regular twenty-first century piece of equipment, but most decidedly wasn’t.  Removing his wrist strap, he linked it to the laptop through a specially designed port in the mouse pad. Cameron had mentioned that the soul trap had originally belonged to a family called Dalgliesh. Old Edinburgh money. One living member, Sarah, the daughter of the family.

            He didn’t have to search long. Sarah Dalgliesh, art expert and philanthropist, lived in her family home in Dublin Street. The family came from the Selkirk Valley, and still had considerable land holdings there. Sarah was the last direct descendant of the Dalgliesh of Ashiestiel. The next heir was a Doctor Anna Charteris currently residing somewhere in the wilds of Canada.  

            The Dalgliesh had been art collectors for at least five centuries, in a reserved way that seemed to match their behavior in general. According to the breathless natter of popular magazine writers and the more measured prose of art experts they had at least one or two superb examples of every period plus a number of curiosities, as a rather kittenish author had put it. One of the photos that accompanied that article showed the soul trap among other things that resembled Egyptian statuettes and Chinese boxes but weren’t. Another showed Sarah Dalgliesh herself holding it in her hands, smiling.

            Something about the woman’s face caught Hart’s eye. He called up other articles and family portraits, going back for about four hundred years. They were a thoroughly Scottish-looking bunch, the Dalgliesh, bluff and blond and tending to marry petite blonde women who seemed to love being fecund, because they were always surrounded by a mob of bluff, blond children. Except… in every generation there was one daughter, or niece, sister, or cousin who shared the same alabaster skin and emerald eyes, long-fingered hands and elongated throats, and most obviously the luxurious fall of curly red hair. Even the heavy-lidded expressions were the same. It was as if… he ran some measurements, and then sat back, nodding to himself.

            It wasn’t a family resemblance. It was the same woman.  And unless there was some sort of wholesale immortality outbreak of the Harkness type – something Hart took leave to doubt – there was some alien living a very long life in the bosom of one of Edinburgh’s best families. An alien who collected curiosities that happened to be of extraterrestrial origin.

            He packed up the laptop and replaced the strap on his wrist. It was time to pay a visit to Dublin Street.